Social Cards, Segmentation Options, New Currencies, and More in v9.4

With our latest release, we’re introducing easy ways for you to customize the way your campaigns look on social networks, debuting two new ways to segment recipients for your campaigns, and adding three new international currencies.

Social Cards

Have you ever wished you could control which thumbnails were used when your email is shared on Twitter, Facebook or in Gmail’s new promotional grid view? Wish no more! We’ve added Social Cards to help you better engage subscribers on these networks.

Start by selecting Social Cards from the Preview and Test menu in the design step of the campaign editor.

From there, you can specify the featured image and write a short, enticing description of your campaign. Choose an image by scrolling through the ones currently in your campaign or by selecting one from the file manager. The preview pane shows how it will look on Twitter, Facebook, and in the Gmail promotional tab’s grid view.

Related: to learn more about the concept of "cards" in UI design, see this and this (via Khoi Vinh).

New segmentation options

In the Setup step of the editor, you’ll see a new option under each list: Paste emails to build a segment. We added this so you can quickly and more naturally send to a segment of recipients that you store elsewhere, such as in a CRM. Simply copy and paste the list of email addresses into the text area, click Build Segment, and we’ll take it from there.

Recipients from the pasted list of emails must be actively subscribed to your list, of course, and we’ll show you the match results before you move on.

You can export a list from your CRM, open it in Excel, create a pivot table or perform some other data magic tricks, then copy-paste your results right into this field. We’ll automatically exclude any emails that are not actively subscribed in that MailChimp list.

Segments created by pasting a list are saved as static segments for future use.

We’ve also added the ability to select draft or scheduled campaigns for segmentation criteria, allowing you to create engagement-based campaigns without needing a time machine. (Once again, our time machine still wasn’t ready for this release. Apologies!)

New currencies

MailChimp’s 6 million customers are doing business and delivering emails all over the globe, so we’re excited to announce support for billing in the Canadian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, and the Japanese yen. You’ll be able to select these currencies from the billing page along with the 13 currencies already supported.

Embed form code tweaks

We’ve made a few tweaks to the code for posting embedded forms. We’ve updated the version of jQuery, and the code will now import in noConflict mode without interfering with other scripts running on your sites. Included with this fix is support for https, so if your site is served under https, your users will no longer see mixed content warnings when they subscribe to your list. We did this by making the calls inherit the scheme of your site, so you won’t need to tweak anything. To update your embed form code, follow this step by step tutorial.

Fun stuff

With this release, it’s easier to spice up your campaigns by importing animated GIFs from Giphy. Based on my extensive research, I estimate that cat GIFs increase engagement by 2000 to 8000%, perhaps even more so when lasers are involved. (I’m no data scientist, but those numbers feel right.) GIFs can even be useful sometimes, too.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a little game we think you’re going to dig. Inspired by our beloved high-five screen, FastFives is a pleasant diversion that’s perfect for that freshly-sent-campaign moment of glory.

Looking forward

Once we tear ourselves away from our own games of FastFives, we’ll start looking forward to v9.5. We’re poring over research to figure out where we can improve our automation features. And, as usual, we’ve got some other top-secret tricks up our sleeve, so be on the lookout for the next release in about a month.

This blog post promises “To update your embed form code, follow this step by step tutorial.”, but the article is for how to create a new embed form, not update it! Is it possible for you to share what the code changes are? Such as, if you have “xyz code”, change it to “abc code”?

If I don’t do anything, and don’t need the new features, will my forms still work?

I’m using a first name merge tag in the subject line of an email which works great when sending an email but with these social cards the subject line shows up as *|TITLE:FNAME|*. Any ideas of getting around this since the subject line for social cards is not editable.

Hey Brandon, we pushed an update today that allows you to set a title for your cards. Note that Gmail’s promotional grid view displays content from the email and always uses the email’s subject as the card’s title. This means you cannot set the title for Gmail promotional cards, but merge values in your subject line will render correctly in the promotional grid view.

I’m wondering if you can edit the social cards once the campaign has been sent. Also, when I share the link in FB, I thought there would be a picture since I indicated that one would be used. However, it isn’t shown in the preview when I just copy and past the link provided in the social share area.

Hey Yvette, it’s not possible to edit social cards after a campaign has been sent. We’ve tested sharing and everything seems to be working on our end, except for campaigns created by Email Beamer. We noticed while digging into your comment that Email Beamer campaigns are not generating the proper meta tags for Facebook. We’re getting right on that. If your campaign was not generated through Email Beamer, reach out to support here: http://kb.mailchimp.com/ . Thanks!

Hey Bee! If you don’t enable social cards, you can still send your campaign and no social card will accompany it. Our QA team took a glance and the wording of the informational warning on the Campaign confirmation page is a little “pushy” so it looks like an error. We’re changing that up now, so thanks for the note!